How to Use Twitter for Affiliates

How to Use Twitter for Affiliates

People love Twitter’s straightforward, real-time way of sharing information with others. We’ll show you how to benefit by using it for only 15 minutes a day.

To teach you all about using Twitter as an affiliate, we are going to be covering a wide variety of topics aimed at helping you succeed!

We start by taking you through the what’s what of Twitter, letting you know why you should use it and what you can do there. Then we make it super simple by taking you through the motions of making your own profile. That way you have no reason not to give it a go!

We cover how to get those Tweets up and running, and then what to put in one to grab attention in the vast chorus of tweets on Twitter. Any old thing won’t do, I’m afraid!

Since you’ve gone to the effort of learning all about tweeting, you’ll be wanting to make sure people are actually reading them! We cover how to get more followers for maximum tweet impact.

Ultimately, all this social media savviness is to help you with a strategy that relates to your affiliate goals, so we cover how to bring the fruits of your labor - that is, your followers - back to your affiliate website and offers.

So let’s dig our teeth into why you can’t afford not to use Twitter, and what you can play around with there.

Intro to Twitter

Basically, its huge. The user base of Twitter is truly impressive. Second only to Facebook, it’s got more than 3 hundred million estimated unique monthly visitors, according to eBizMBA.

Twitter is very simple: the short messages people send each other are easy to digest on the go. People love this straightforward, to-the-minute way of sharing information with each other, so you can get a large benefit even by using it for only 15 minutes a day.

Messages on Twitter are called “tweets”, and you can send these to your followers as well as the general public. They have a limit of 140 characters, so it’s easy to produce many of them in a short amount of time.

Twitter allows people to follow others’ tweets when they come across something they like. You will use this to get regular traffic to your Twitter, and ultimately to your affiliate website.

That sounds pretty good, right? Let’s cover how to create your own Twitter account to allow you to get your Tweet on.

How to Get Started with Twitter

Head to Twitter and register for an account. Fill in all the details it asks for, such as name, email address, username and password.

Once you’re in, enter details to your about page. Do this to ensure your Twitter profile is accessible and easy to understand for other Twitter users, who might be interested in your affiliate website.

Your “about” section is also a good place to put keywords, as well as your affiliate site’s URL, because people can search for you according to what words your bio contains.

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Don’t forget to add a profile image. Make sure this is relevant to your brand so it will easily identify back to your website when your Twitter followers go through to it.

When you have a profile set up, it’s time to get yourself out there. Following other people who tweet content relevant to your niche is a fantastic way to start drawing attention to your new Twitter profile, so make sure to find some.

If you are unsure on the best ways to do this, try going to Follower wonk to search for relevant Twitter users based on your niche or topic.

You simply type keywords from your niche into the search bar, select whether you want to look at profiles or bios, and click the “do it” button.

Followerwonk gives you a list of Twitter users related to your keyword. You can see and sort by how many tweets they’ve tweeted, how many people they are following, how many followers they have, how long they've been active on Twitter, and their social authority in the site.

While you do need to recruit army of followers, you also need to give them something to read, and that’s where your own tweets come in.

How to Tweet

So how is this Tweeting thing done? Posting a Tweet is very simple. You just click on the text box on the left side of your screen and enter your text.

Alternatively, you can click on the blue square with a white feather, located at the top of your screen on the navigation bar. That’s the “Compose New Tweet” button.

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Once your text is entered, click the blue “tweet” button and it’s away!

On Twitter, placing the hash symbol before a word or phrase is using what’s called a “hashtag”. This enables people with an interest in your keyword to see your Tweet, whether they follow you or not. Hashtags don’t have to be at the beginning or end of your tweet, either. You can place them wherever the most relevant word naturally sits in your sentence.

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If you click on a hashtagged word, you’ll see other Tweets are also marked with that keyword.

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This is how non-followers with relevant interests can find you, and just as importantly, how you can find them.

Be careful not to spam each tweet with too many of these hashtags. Using any more than two is excessive. Just focus on the most relevant words to ensure your tweets hit their mark.

Similarly to hashtags, you can place an ‘at’ symbol before writing someone's name in order to include them in your Tweet. This way people can click on the name and find that person. If you use this whenever relevant in your tweets, you should get some people doing the same when they have something relevant to you.

The great thing about this is it spreads your reach by enabling their followers to click their way to you through the Tweet. Most Twitter users incorporate links into their tweets all the time, and it’s a good chance for you to link back to your affiliate site or offer.

To add a link to a Tweet you can type or copy and paste it into the tweet itself, or into the “What’s Happening?” box.

Writing Better Tweets

Your Tweets are your voice here, so it’s critical to make them high quality. Why? The social media cycle. Great Tweets get more followers. More followers lead to a higher level of social media engagement. That engagement is what ultimately leads to traffic.

Tests show that better headlines are what snags attention in the gargantuan mass of tweets flying around daily. You can increase your conversion rate on a website or link by 73 percent by making sure that your headline is compelling.

Make your headings the answer to questions your target audience might have on the brain, such as:

Keep it relevant to your niche, and really try to get into the head of your audience to produce a headline that they would click through on.

The first thing is mastering the art of maximum impact in minimal space. You only have 140 characters. If you had 10 seconds to catch someone’s attention with a story about your day, you wouldn’t start at the toast you had for breakfast.

Sink your teeth into the most interesting bits of what you want to say. Whenever you write a Tweet, think: Does it have all the information, hashtags, and links that I need it to, nothing more and nothing less?”​ Keep it as snappy and interesting as you can, putting in only what you need to.

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If an “at username” begins a sentence, only people who are following both of you will see the Tweet. If you want to ensure more people see it, put something before the @ symbol, or re-structure the sentence.

While the other methods show to be negative on the scale or less than1 percent ReTweetable, Bitly is showing a whopping almost 10 percent.

Simply type, or copy-paste the link you want shortened into the box, and Bitly will do the rest for you. It gives you a link to copy and paste into your Tweet or “What’s Happening” box.

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How to Get More Followers

So you’ve made your links to your Twitter page, affiliate site, or offers Re-Tweetable. Now you just need to give your followers a reason to want to pass your Tweet on.

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While Tweeting is the language, followers are the population, and you want as many citizens loyal to you as possible.

Resist the temptation to go and buy Twitter followers. They will probably be fake or non-responsive accounts, and you could end up banned, which is the last thing you want for your brand.

Announce on your affiliate site that you have Twitter and that people should follow you for up-to-the-minute content.

That seesaw of “I follow you, you follow me” is really one of the best ways to generate a following.

Find those relevant people via their tweets and websites like Followerwonk. Be careful not to be overly zealous with this though, because if you follow more people than the amount of followers you have, you run the risk of losing authority. Be selective to become a more influential personality.

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Target more influential personalities, and engage with them in addition to your following. Join in on their conversations. Try to have something helpful or interesting to add, or show appreciation if they have an interesting Tweet. Especially focus on selecting those with a large influence in your niche on Twitter.

To avoid slipping off the radar of your new-found followers, you need to post regular Tweets. Try to aim for at least 3 or 4 daily at first, to show your account is active. Affilotools’ social module allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, which can make regular Tweeting easy, without having to be on Twitter all day.

If you do schedule Tweets, however, keep an eye on the news to stop them going out if circumstances change. If there was a tsunami, you don’t want a “Check out my 7 reasons for loving #weather post!” tweet to go out, especially since you would have already pulled that blog post.

Tweet Strategies

The overall strategy with using Twitter as an affiliate is to drive traffic back to your affiliate site via your social media interactions, and the key is a patient, smooth and seamless transition.

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Twitter is for social interaction, your affiliate site is for selling. Use Twitter as the bait to get them back to your site, not just a hook to catch them into a direct sale. If they see a hook, they won’t bite.

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Link to quality testimonials, blog posts, and squeeze pages to get them to your affiliate site, as well as other valuable info they might be interested in. Always tell people what you are linking to, though. No one likes feeling tricked and if the link goes to something different or poor quality, they won’t exactly become your biggest fan.

If a follower engages with you, make sure to reply as fast as possible while they have you on the brain. Reply to them, thank them, ask them questions to keep a dialogue going about something genuine. No one is looking to be friends with a robot, so be as human as possible to build the best rapport with your audience.

Tweet when your followers are actually online to ensure the best chance of interaction. You can check what times your following is online the most at Followerwonk, and that’s when you need to be active too.

For example, if your niche is fitness, and the Followerwonk Analysis shows your Twitter contacts tend to come online the most between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., chances are they are looking for motivation for their after-work exercise routine.

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This means that you need to post around 5 p.m. to get the most exposure.

Conclusion

So there you have it! We’ve been over what this Twitter thing is all about, as well as how to set up your own profile and get tweeting. We shared insight on how to write better tweets to captivate your audience, then build your base of followers, not to mention the ultimate strategies to turn your social media use into affiliate success.

Where to Now?

Go ahead and set up your Twitter profile if you don’t have one already. Practice tweeting with captivating headlines for your best chances at getting click-throughs when you post links. Try using the AffiloTools social module to schedule tweets to keep them regular, and to make sure your followers know when you have new content or juicy deals coming up.

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